> There are plenty of examples of native programs leveraging object storage, whether in the cloud, or on-premises. Consider the latest release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which streams high-quality assets (city/building 3D models, terrain, textures, weather data, real-time NPC air traffic, etc) in real-time as the user flies over the virtual Earth[1]. The competition has distinctly worse graphical fidelity, primarily because of storage concerns

Well that's cool, but why on earth would I expect to use a POSIX API for that, and conversely, why would I expect to use the API that presumably is used for that (decidely non-POSIX-y in most ways) when I want to interact with my own kernel and associated hardware? The tasks are fundamentally different.

"I want object storage APIs for local storage" <= completely reasonable

"I want object storate APIs to be like POSIX or vice versa" <= considerably less reasonable